Lubbock Business Expo 2006
We spent a few hours on Thursday at the Lubbock Business Expo, which was held at the Civic Center, downtown. I took a few of our employees with me, and we walked around all of the booths there -- taking a look at the various Lubbock businesses. Overall, I wasn't very impressed.There were a lot of exhibitors there, probably around 400 or so. I walked the floor of the entire trade show, and in many places, I walked it twice. Out of all 400 booths, and thousands of exhibitors, not a single one stepped out of their booth to talk to me. I do not know who employs these trade show employees, but if they worked for me, I think we'd have to have some serious discussions about what they do at a trade show.
They should have been stepping out of the booths, saying "Hello, my name is XYZ, and I'm with ABC company, can I interest you in what we are offering?" And when I said "No thanks", they should have had a response for that as well. Instead, the best I got was one exhibitor attempting to hand me a flyer.
However, out of all of the booths, the one I remember the most is a potential competitor in the area, CirriTech. CirriTech sells computer systems (networking equipment and networks in general) to the Lubbock market. And the way that they promote their services is by hiring about six Texas Tech (or Lubbock area, anyway) girls to wear Hooters attire, and show off their womanly goods. Their tank-tops had some coy saying on the back, like "No one touches me or my network except CirriTech."
Now, their marketing, in one sense, was pure genius. They are targeting business owners, and those are typically males. Middle aged males. The best way to get their heads to turn is to outfit some college-aged girls with push-up bras and little else. As an aside, back in the hay-days of Comdex, it was very popular to hire local strippers to man the booth, in a similar fashion. So, the CirriTech employees were having the girls sit on bar stools and take pictures with passerbys, as long as they dropped off a business card. The marketing message was clear. Drop off a business card. Get a picture with five or six college hotties.
My issue with this tactic is that, in two weeks, when the CirriTech sales guy gets around to calling each of those business cards, and says "I'm with CirriTech, you took a picture with our girls at the Lubbock Business Expo", how many of those professionals will remember what a CirriTech does? I hypothesize that the number will be extremely low.
Also of interest during the show was a significant lack of medium sized companies. Most of what I saw was small companies (less than 50-60 employees). There's nothing wrong with this, but I did find it interesting that most of the top employers (Texas Tech, Covenant, UMC, United, Plains Capital Bank, Subway, etc....) of Lubbock were absent.
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